But the thing many people are talking about isn’t the book itself. It’s the translator.

Deborah Smith, the 28-year-old Brit behind the novel’s masterful translation to English, only started learning Korean six years ago. So how did she manage to interpret the book so well?

“If you’re asking for the secret, I’m afraid I’m as ignorant as you are,” she says. “Looking back now it feels like I must have looked up almost every other word in the dictionary. That’s probably an exaggeration, but that’s what it felt like at the time. It was a bit like climbing a mountain.”

She says her newness to Korean was actually a boon. “I really knew that I needed to double-check everything and be extra careful,” she says. “I also had to question the dictionary translations of certain terms.”

Plus, with literature, direct translations don’t always work best. “Just because it’s the literal equivalent doesn’t mean it’s the right word to use if you are aiming for some kind of literary effect,” she says. More.

Read the full story and listen to the podcast in PRI here: http://www.pri.org/stories/2016-05-18/how-self-taught-translator-created-literary-masterpiece-one-word-time

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